What Happened?

About the Company

Echelon Corporation is a leading independent control networking company for the Industrial Internet of Things. Echelon delivers multi-protocol and multi-media elements necessary to design, install, monitor and control industrial-strength `communities of devices` within the lighting, building automation and Internet of Things markets worldwide. The company develops and sells complete systems and subsystems for target applications, plus system-on-chips (SoCs), embedded software, and commissioning and management tools for OEMs. With more than 100 million Echelon-powered devices installed worldwide, the company helps its customers easily and safely migrate existing control systems to the most modern platforms, while bringing new devices and applications into an ever-growing global Industrial Internet. Echelon helps its customers reduce operational costs, enhance satisfaction and safety, grow revenues and perform better in both established and emerging markets.

About the Person

Sohrab Modi most recently served as vice president and CTO of Central Research and Development at FutureWei, a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of Huawei, where he was responsible for technical strategy and planning for the company’s Internet of Things/machine-to-machine (IoT/M2M), cloud, big data, middleware, software-defined networking (SDN) and other initiatives. He also set Huawei’s software strategic direction and spearheaded corporate open-compute and open-source activities. Before Huawei, Modi was a vice president in the corporate Chief Technology Office at Sun Microsystems, where he explored new business and technology opportunities for the company. Earlier, he was Sun’s vice president and general manager for N1 systems, an early cloud computing offering, and director of engineering for Sun Cluster, Sun’s high-availability (HA) solution for mission-critical and telecommunications company (telco) environments. Earlier in his career, Modi was an engineering manager for Novell Inc., and he gained startup experience as CEO of Beehive Utility Inc. and as proprietor of Embee Corp. He earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Mumbai and his master’s degree in computer science from the Rochester (New York) Institute of Technology.